Happy Almost New Year

As expected, life has been filled with holiday and home-commitments as of late, but I have managed a few movie-related things...

There was some confusion with the release forms for TAINTED BLOOD, but after I found my copies, copied them and mailed them off, I heard that the originals had been found after all. Oh well, at least things are moving ahead on the anthology it will be a part of.

I printed up 100 direct-mail pieces to mail out to the ol' Dr. Squid mailing list of past buyers and interested folks. It's an 11 x 17 piece folded over, then folded in thirds, tabbed, labelld and stamped, so ti's taken a couple of days to get it all together. Hoping that since TRAILER PARK DOUBLE WIDE TRILOGY OF TERROR will be new to most of these folks (I did a small postcard mailing over the summer, but this is a much bigger mailing) and this time I will be directed them to buy BLOODSUCKING REDNECK VAMPIRS from me instead of from b-movie.com directly, it will result in some sales, which will help offset various productions and post-production costs on current projects. Oh, I also updated, added to and repriced (as is discounted) my list of comic books, magazines and assorted videos for sale and included that as well. We'll see if anyone is interested...

I've been working on a prop for a vampire short I'm going to have someone shoot for me. I originally went to the Dollar Tree to see if I could find a toy camera that would look halfway professional. All I could find was a boxy instamatic type on, but picked it up anyway. In hindsight I didn't even need the camera, I could've just started with a box, but it's only a dollar. Over the last couple of days, I duct taped a few round rings leftover from one of my son's toys (they had plastic parts on them and you pulled them off like parts of a model kit, leaving the plastic rings to be discarded) to the front to create a decent-looking lens portion. I also taped on a small plasic box (that previously held the suntanning goggles that "Tulsa" wore in BLOODSUCKING REDNECK VAMPIRES) to the side as sort of a handle/battery pack kind of thing. Additionally, I found an empty individual serving pancake syrup comtainer, like the ones you get at restaurants, and attached it to the top to use as the "flash" portion. I painted the whole thing with black laytex paint, which helped hide the tape lines a tad and today plan to finish it off by plainting it with black spray paint (to get int he nooks and crannies and give it a nice shine) and adding a plastic container lid "lens" to the very front. I'm hoping that as long as there are no cloe-ups of the prop in the short, the audience will never really think that the camera isn't real. Man, am I cheap!

I also finished dubbing off the DEADLY PREMONITIONS raw footage from miniDV to VHS for scene logging.

Also have done some work trying to get articles/interviews together for www.b-movie.com's DARK GALLERY e-zine. I think everyone is out of town for the holidays, though!

Hoping to begin on the mummy mask & costume for a DR. PUDDING'S MONSTER FILES segment today, but will have to see how the day unfolds.

Didn't get much sleep last night. I need some aspirin. See you next year.

Half and Half

Well, even after spending bits of my evenings for a few weeks clearing off a whole bunch of files in preparation for a system upgrade (which itself was necesitated by a new printer purchase), I couldn't get TAINTED BLOOD to output to tape without lots of "hiccups" as it played into the last 5 or 6 minutes of the 20 minute short. I think I just didn't have enough processing power to keep up with the file when outputting it.

So I duplicated the whole thing, then took the last 10 minutes off of the first file and the first 10 minutes off of the second file. The result was having 2 10-minute files (Tainted Blood part one; Tainted Blood part two) that I could output to tape just fine. Taking the front half off was problematic and at times I felt like I was re-doing all of the sound and music, but I finally got the video and audio timelines all back in synch. While I don't claim to be an expert and certainly have a pedetrian machine that not really set-up for video editing, at least I have it backed up so I can clear it off of my machine and move on to other projects.

We have a couple of the new iMac G5s at the office. Man those are sweeeeeeeeet. Now if I could just find $1200 in my couch cushions...

As expected all manner of holiday-related and family-related chores have cropped up so movement on anything movie-wise has been next to nil.

Here's to 2006!

Saw III

My grandmother passed away last Friday after a battle with cancer. Sad, sad times. She had a number of hobbies and talents and was always ready with a joke. She also played the saw. Sometime earlier this year, I asked her to play for my 8-year-old son and I. Always having movie ideas floating around in the back of my head, I thought it would be cool to feature her and her saw-playing in a movie sometime. Maybe some kids are on a road trip and stop one night to stay with someone's grandmom, who tells a hilarous off-color joke and then later plays the saw for them. I envisioned the characters laughing under their breath at the notion, but then being stunned at the otherwordly and kind of creepy sounds she could produce. Perhaps the music would reappear later in the movie or become an underlying theme for a number of melodies as the movie progressed.

But now I'll never be able to do that.

Damn.